Time
COUNT iterations of
CODE.CODE may be a string to eval or a code reference; either way the
CODE will run in the caller's package. Results will be printed to
STDOUT as
TITLE followed by the times.
TITLE defaults to ``timethis
COUNT'' if none is provided.
STYLE determines the format of the output, as described for
timestr() below.

The
COUNT can be zero or negative: this means the minimum number of
CPU seconds to run.
A zero signifies the default of 3 seconds. For example
to run at least for 10 seconds:

timethis(-10, $code)

or to run two pieces of code tests for at least 3 seconds:

timethese(0, { test1 => '...', test2 => '...'})

CPU seconds is, in
UNIX terms, the user time plus the system time of the process itself, as opposed to the real (wallclock) time and the time spent by the child processes. Less than 0.1 seconds is not accepted (-0.01 as the count, for example, will cause a fatal runtime exception).

Note that the
CPU seconds is the minimum time:
CPU scheduling and other operating system factors may
complicate the attempt so that a little bit more time is spent. The
benchmark output will, however, also tell the number of $code runs/second, which should be a more interesting number than the actually
spent seconds.

Returns a string that formats the times in the
TIMEDIFF object in the requested
STYLE.TIMEDIFF is expected to be a Benchmark object similar to that returned by
timediff().

STYLE can be any of 'all', 'noc', 'nop' or 'auto'.
'all' shows each of the 5 times available ('wallclock' time, user time,
system time, user time of children, and system time of children). 'noc'
shows all except the two children times. 'nop' shows only wallclock and the
two children times. 'auto' (the default) will act as 'all' unless the
children times are both zero, in which case it acts as 'noc'.

FORMAT is the printf(3)-style format specifier (without the leading '%') to use to print the
times. It defaults to '5.2f'.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other